Boys in Zinc: Svetlana Alexievich (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Biography: Svetlana Alexievich (Author) Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). Alexievich, writing in the same reportage style as in Chernobyl Prayer, dives into the voices of soldiers who served and survived, of the widows and bereaved mothers of the dead, of doctors and nurses and scientists and other Russian staff who worked in the warzone without being military, and always the same massive problems are repeated: the ready access to heroin, the torture and dismemberment frequently performed by the guerilla “enemies”, the confused narrative given to the soldiers that they must protect their homeland, Russia, by murdering and stealing the homeland of other people. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.

In 1985, the book was published by several publishers, and the number of printed copies reached 2,000,000 in the next five years. I would sit down at the piano the way he did, and sometimes start walking the way he did, especially after he was killed.A large part of its subject is the systematic mutilation, destruction, abuse and betrayal of a generation of Soviet teenagers sent to wage war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was always the blue-eyed heroes who were the first to be killed: you’d meet one of those types and before you knew it, he was dead. That night, they let the parents sleep inside the unit on mats laid out in the sports hall, but we didn’t lie down until far into the night, instead we wandered round the barracks where our sons were asleep. Hanser Berlin, München 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24150-3; als Taschenbuch: Suhrkamp, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-518-46572-1. I’ve been here for two weeks and I can’t shake the feeling that war is a product of masculine nature, which is unfathomable to me.

The officer accompanying me couldn’t help himself: “Who knows…my coffin might be over there… They’ll stick me in it… What am I fighting for here? Alexievich visited Afghanistan during the conflict but also spoke to veterans, widows, medics and mothers back home in the USSR. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).

It’s harrowing and emotive, as well as informative and informed, and I’d personally recommend Boys In Zinc as an important way to plug a gap in ones political historical consciousness that I’m sure isn’t mine alone. When it was first published in the USSR in 1991, Boys in Zinc sparked huge controversy for its unflinching, harrowing insight into the realities of war.